My love is the shape of canine teeth and claw marks
I leave around your neck,
the way I leave poems decaying in an unforgiving landfill —
the gods have turned away in disgust
as I sit and lick, like a rabid dog,
the maggots chipping away from the inside —
the entrails of my grief, all pulled out without mercy,
without a deathbed confession,
without a god to listen.
I long for something else to unfold;
something sacred and beautiful
when you turn my body inside out, but lo.
This is as deep and far as we go.
Tell me, I beseech, does my filth look better inside out,
uncovered, on display,
penetrating your very skin?
Take what you need, love, they are all yours —
my sins, my wounds, my impiety
in exchange for your darkened heart — I’ll spit it out
and swallow it back
down to my underbelly where no one can ever take it —
not you, not the gods, not their fallen, forsaken angels.

Forgive me — forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
Forgive my unforgiving hands, forgive my unforgiving poems
if our sick, twisted, defilement is all they ever know.

this is how i'll let you go:

i'll open our photo albums for the last time, touch the yellow edges where your body ends, and not get drunk on what we could have been. i will wipe the coffee stains you left in perfect circles; sometimes, i pretend that they had the color of your eyes when the sunlight hits them. i will scrub your fingerprints off my spine; it's time for them to let me go too — slower, gentler than the way you did.

i will pass by your street, and not send you a bunch of paper rings engraved with all my overused metaphors. i will not hope you'll chase after me, wearing them over the promises we've broken, and over the promises we're yet to break. i will stay up late; midnights are somehow still for missing you, but i won't be writing anything. and we both know it kills me — not writing poems about you, when loving you and losing you are the closest things i ever got to call poetry.

instead, i'll hold on tight on every word that spills out of my mouth, seal them all in a trinket box buried in some place where we let romance die. i will fall asleep next to our cemeteries, wet from the rains we made; i might wake up at 3 am and not think of calling you. and i will wake up at 7 am, when it's still raining, and i will watch the early morning thunderstorms, and i won't wish you're back with it. i will sit there, free from the damp coffee stains and from the traces of your kiss. my tailbone will no longer recall the intricacy found in your fingerprints, and my eyes — they will have forgotten if yours were cobalt or turquoise or electric blue, 'cause darling, maybe it's too late to make you love me again, but it's not too late love myself.

to kiss you senseless until i am a seaglass buried deep inside your skin. to lick salt off your palms with paper-cut lips, until each breath has gone haywire. to quietly sigh your name until it baptizes my heathen tongue. oh, the wars i would start; the wars i would end — darling, there is something soothing about all the violent ways i can love you.

maybe some types of chaos do not have to make sense or unveil some semblance of an epiphany. some types of chaos, you just have to feel. some types of chaos, you just have to lie through.

I have a bad habit
of falling for
messed up people.
Maybe it’s because
my own sadness
recognizes theirs.

So darling, let's fall in love

and apart.

i am sorry but my bones will always love you like hell, like it was war, like the world needs to end in the process, like the hand of god, taking you out of my ribs and now he needs to return it back where it rightfully belong. i will always love you, in godless sacrilege. i am sorry if i don’t know any other way.

Some days, the emptiness isn't even obvious. You're brushing your teeth or putting on your favorite denim jacket or adjusting your wristwatch and it's there, lurking and you don't mind at all. It almost feels normal. Right, even.

But there are days and nights — mostly nights, when it feels colossal, you can't ignore it. There are times when it stares back, it's impossible to pretend it's not there. There are times when it feels out of place and you just sort of wanna dig for what's dead inside, or claw through your ribcages, or crack your chest open — anything, just to get it out of you.

I know I have been okay for a while now, but it feels odd — not knowing how to handle being okay. I have been held captive by the emptiness — the kind that consumes you from the inside out. I have been that girl, trapped in a skin, and my wrists have become the walls she scratches whenever she tries to escape.

I have fallen apart with sunsets to déjà vus I have long forgotten, and my brain — it has become Eris incarnate and my body — her armless prey, walking willingly into her trap. I have been Ophelia, tiptoeing on a willow tree and drowning in a lake of deep, black butterflies. So being okay and all this — it doesn't feel right at all, and maybe it's possible to despair for sadness. Maybe it's possible to morph with the darkness I thought I wanted to escape. Maybe it's possible to ache for self-destruction with an intensity I've never known before.. I no longer know what's wrong with my brain, but maybe it's possible to feel so lost, so broken, so messed up for so long — that being whole feels like a mistake.

i need a safe place to take off my skin and scoop out all the sorrows it carries. it peels. it burns, like a banished soul. but i have stopped saying my prayers — they just crumble into a ghostly sigh. i need a safe place — to take a peek at my demons without looking like one of them: a hurtful father. a forsaken son. a snake that sheds its memories and sins. i need a safe place to still my breathing — without my fingers pressed on a bruise and without my hands around neck. i need a safe place — a place away from all these thoughts, away from all these hurting. away from all of me.

i am looking at it now from afar — that certain kind of pain that would mirror mine; how immense it must be to go through it, and i can only imagine getting out. how immense the pain must be, how terrible, to wish for a kind of comfort only a certain, abrupt finality can bring. i am looking at it now from afar: skin as gray as mine and lately, the daybreak just brings in its rays more nights for us to swallow.

if it brings you any semblance of a cold comfort — the one you seek, i hope you know, i'll die in your place. i wish i can take it all away.

nothing i do will you bring back;

not the shoebox of purple hyacinths
watered by the i love you's
i still wanted to say.

not the prose poetries i wrote you
whilst caught in a mania
in the restrooms of dying gas stations.

not the caving in of the see-through walls
mixed with static humming of the payphone calls.

not the pillow telegrams that smell like
bourbon and my mother's cigarettes;
darling, my bed has become a post office
of the letters i never had the chance to write
and of the things i never
had the chance to say.

and nothing i say will bring you back —
not even this poem, and i know that now;
i just don't know
how to live with that.

still, nothing will ever bring you back
and darling, watching you fall out of love
feels like the only thing i can do right now.

now my ribs recede with the heaviest sunsets; look and miss a missing body. look and miss an unmarked grave. right here where i lie indefinitely, there's no headstone grand enough to carve this grief into. there's a hand, repelled by a poem. there is a grief without a name.

My throat is heavy with August’s sorrows
I sit by the shore and wait for the weakest waves
to drown my little feet — I  stagger over them like a clumsy giant.
But it’s seaborne sadness wraps, a constant, unrelenting embrace
like a mother’s grief,
a gentle creature’s death,
a rabid dog feasting on a poor, meatless bone.
I am alive — so cruelly alive for it all
as it falls

down my throat, down my chest like a child’s pained whisper.
My body is heavy with August’s weight as I retire to my filthy bed
and hold myself.

Cold are the nights in their quiet,
lackadaisical, taunting hours.

Come now, September. Come, kindly, if you please;
sweep me away into a million, invisible dust particles
suspended

under clueless, flickering lights.

I. One day, the moon will forgive me for all the ways I broke myself, until I was a driftwood crumbling into dust, stirring on the edge of your bed — all the faint traces of the ocean gone. The moon will forgive me for growing bruises where your lips once staked claim.

No, that was not my fall from grace, I whisper; my skin has long abandoned tenderness at the doorstep of the first boy who broke my heart. Maybe I had been broken since. Now, there are some things you can never fix: all the bones that you'd once held are all the bones that break.

II. And I know, it'll forgive me for sinking into the comfort a stranger's sheets somewhere in this bleak, forgotten town. It's been a month, and I am made of lows and pathetic attempts to forget your voice. And the moon knows I was never cut out for love — only for things that resemble it. So when you wrung poems out of my tangled pulseline, when you muttered you loved me that July night, it'll forgive me for sighing myself to oblivion, having been undone by your gaze. It'll forgive me for having wanted to die in your arms. And oh, it was beautiful while it lasted.

We were beautiful while we lasted.

III. And still, I am never cut out for love. The one I know is made for burning down cathedrals. For leaving dead flowers in the gaps of your ribs. For throwing poems under the bridge. For throwing myself thereafter. I always had a proclivity for things that leave me hurting in the aftermath of disasters. And there are no poems left to make sense of it all. Just erratic thoughts. Just a flight risk caught in the loose ends where memories are left to rot.

No, there are no poems to write anymore. Just heartbreak. Just lonely rooms, and drawn curtains, and your scent, fading from these sheets — held close. In silence. Despite it all.

IV. And one day, the moon will forgive me for wanting to stay when I should be leaving.

Maybe I will forgive myself too.

this cold sunrise will choke on all the dark, sunless ways that i am in love you. sweet one, let's watch the light as it falls apart and crawl, like ether on our golden skin. this is us sitting in the last of september's lights — this is us in the finitude of poetry, and i have never seen anything as beautiful.

I'll always feel in my chest broken Septembers. I am languishing with the days, head first to a point of no return. I am the ghost of an abducted goddess, the one who bled all over saffrons and still holds on to her sorrows. I bid farewell to the sunglow on wildflowers. I bid farewell to daylit copper fields. I bid farewell to golden hours, as down I descend to the sweetest madness, and up it goes to consume me.

there are days when my room turns into an ocean and i, a shipwreck of the person i used to be. i know i'm supposed to save myself — they tell me i'm supposed to clutch onto a lifeline of heartbeats attached to the shore, that i'm supposed to drain these night-tides dry. but my sadness is born from the seafoam and the seafoam — it's everywhere.

it's everywhere.

they tell me i'm supposed to save myself, that i'm supposed to sink my maelstroms on the bleakest of the sea beds. but how do i tell them that i am the maelstrom that needs destroying? how do i tell them that i have become the love child of melancholia and of the ocean after the storm? they tell me i'm supposed to live — i tell myself i'm supposed to live. but today, i'm quite okay with sinking into the depths the ocean floor.

today, i'm quite okay with not saving myself. today, i'm quite okay with drowning.

Let's cut the crap and all that sweet **** — we weren't those kind of people. We weren't made for romance and sappy poetries, weren't made for love songs, and cringey sweet nothings and gazing at the sunrise after camping out for the night on a hill. We were made to hold hands and a few almost-kisses during drinking sessions and forget about it the next day, to smoke and lie down a little bit too close to each other on rooftops and talk about depression and anxiety attacks, and deny everything in the morning. We were made for my unsaid "I miss you too's", that want to escape my lips the moment you say your drunken "I miss you's". We were made to see each other break down in between a pack of cigarettes and two bottles of local ***. We were more like two ****** up souls recognizing each other; more like two faultlines causing an earthquake and taking everything down with them, more like the first raindrops to fall apart before a thunderstorm, like two planets out of orbit crashing on each other in a brief but destructive way.

You see, maybe we're just drawn to people similar to us, and maybe, we're just drawn to each other because we're equally messed up. Maybe it was just the strong urge to save the other that borderlined to romance. But I guess being messed up wears people out, and sometimes I find myself wondering who got exhausted first. Where did the talks about "wanting to die together" go? When did the conversations about our saddest secrets cease? What stopped "Man, loving you is a disaster I won't mind being struck by," from coming? Was I too depressive and sad for you? Were my breakdowns suffocating? Did my fuckedupness stop feeling like home and started looking just plain ****** up? When did you start fading away? Why would you do that? Stupid questions.

You should know, it beats the **** out of me to say it, but I was perhaps a little bit desperate for you to stay. Perhaps I got too comfortable with your demons, I almost adopted them as mine. Perhaps the fact that you were willing to give me your ******-up all was comforting. Perhaps I was selfish, and I kinda wanted my darkness to be the only darkness you'll wanna light. Perhaps I miss you and it feels like I'm a chainsmoker on withdrawal from her cigarettes, and what ***** more is that I don't even know if I still cross your mind as that same sad girl you were happy being sad with, as that same sad girl who had always been your destination, and the very same one you apparently stopped coming to. And perhaps, thinking about all of these is *******. We weren't some modern-day knight and damsel. You weren't the guy with the beautiful blue eyes, and I'm not the girl with the blue washed denim they sing about. We were just misfits who made a mess out of the messed ups we already are, as if that isn't already enough. We were just planes thrown in the air, hoping to land, but ending up crashed and burnt. And that's how it always worked for people like us.

I was never worn out by your sadness as much as I was worn out by mine. And clearly, you were my favorite messed up, but, you're just not worth it anymore. And this — this is a just an unpoetic musing about the wrecks that we are, an impulsive attempt of detoxifying you out of my system. This — this is me, disowning your sadness; this is me disowning your demons. So let's just cut the drama and all that sweet **** — we weren't those kind of people. We were the almost-but-not-quite's, the could've-beens, and the never were's. We weren't the kind that bags the happily ever after. We weren't the kind that makes it.

All we are is everything short of lovers. All we're made for is everything short of I love you's. And this is everything short of love.

girls like her won’t break you — girls like her will make you weekly playlists, and write you poems as you sit together on museum floors, and watch your favorite movies, and introduce you to new songs, and steal your hoodie while you read your long-pending books, and drag you out of bed at 2 am’s to watch the stars fall to the earth, and kiss you, right there and then.



and then, they break you.

i.
the scent of sorrow, hanging in the air
rotting away what's left of this skin.
wrists — sewn shut
are wrists undone:
the morbidity of it all pervades —
this i confess.

ii.
look not. turn not, for
each careful stare, each scornful gaze
has me falling back into darkness;
maybe eurydice has found comfort in its arms.
maybe so have i.

maybe this is how it's always meant to end.

iii.
lately, sunsets no longer melt
into an afterglow —
they just turn into the night.
at least it dims
the futility of drawing each shallow breath
from places filled with smoke and dust;

there used to be something there:
this, i confess.
this, i remember.

there used to be something there.

there used to be something h e r e.


— fray // november, must you be so cruel to my trembling hands left with no heart to break?

You deserve someone who can look pain in the eye — an insignia of heartbreak with your name written all over it; your trembling sighs — like rust, lingering over their rosegold lips, and still, not forget that they love you.

like fallen flowers, i am
weary under the subtle noise of a rushing, babbling brook;
a death, quietly scenic
as i go back to dust.
i left my body rotting in a prairie paradise,
here it decays to gray
under the bruised indigo sky.

a ghost writes her poem in silence, in small, made-up synapses,
and the wind sweeps it away.

by now, the moon knows that my chest is just a burial ground for this thousandfold of sighs — in their hands, all different ways of my undoing, and i am a breath away from one. you see, some nights are for the softest, gentlest moments of lunacy. some nights, for waging wars and succumbing into these sighs, barely held by the petals tightening around my throat. by now, the moon knows that i had once been a battlefield and it's a pity — growing poems on such an unholy ground, only to fall apart like aster leaves and ancient city walls.

darling, it's getting dark, and this is starting to look less like poetry — and more like spoils of war from inside my head.

I’d like to think that there is someplace where you never fell out of love with me and out of the orbits we made. And that’s why I still write — for my poems to be that place where words never failed us, where the goodbyes were never said for good, and where I could breathe in your scent at 6 am and know and feel that you were still there; that it wasn’t just another trace you left behind. At least in the poems, I could make you love me still.

At least in the poems, I could undo the fights and stitch our red strings back to each other, and look at you as if I was lost in the sea, and you were made of moon dusts and starlights.

At least in the poems, I could probably make myself enough — make my love enough for you to stay. At least in the poems.

But then again, they’re just poems darling, arranged to look like a happy ending. They’re just poems. And you’re still gone.

You’re still gone.

the dusk wastes its pity on me. in its muted retiring lights, i have learned a terrible habit of forcing poems out of my mouth,
when maybe all i wanna do is be as quiet as the wounds nesting inside my head.

Melt me into a thousand, reflective sighs. I ache for such sweet release — hypnotic, cathartic. I want to see myself drown once — with my life flashing in a slow-spinning liquid mirrorball. Just once in such graceful, calm, permanent surrender. Just once, and for the last time.